Index of American Design

Last updated
Federal Art Project, Index of American Design exhibition poster Index-of-American-Design-Illinois.jpg
Federal Art Project, Index of American Design exhibition poster

The Index of American Design program of the Federal Art Project produced a pictorial survey of the crafts and decorative arts of the United States from the early colonial period to 1900. Artists working for the Index produced a collection of 18,257 watercolor drawings of American decorative and folk arts objects, held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. [1] Although the collection was created by about 400 artists between 1935 and 1942, it was seen more as documentation than personal expression, which is among the reasons it is lesser known than other Federal Art Projects. [2] The Index's goal was establishing the basis for and contextualizing American art and design using, as a basis, these items created between the colonial period and the end of the nineteenth century. [3] [1] [4] [5]

Constance Rourke was the editor and resident scholar of the Index; Ruth Reeves was its field supervisor. [6] Rourke's interest stemmed, in part, from her work on Charles Sheeler. [7] [8] Among the projects that grew out of the Index is Clarence Hornung's Treasury of American Design and as a jobs creation vehicle, the creation of the index employed about one thousand individuals in thirty four different states. [9] [2]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Gallery of Art</span> National art museum in Washington, D.C., United States

The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in 1937 for the American people by a joint resolution of the United States Congress. Andrew W. Mellon donated a substantial art collection and funds for construction. The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western Art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Historical Records Survey</span> Project of the Works Progress Administration

The Historical Records Survey (HRS) was a project of the Works Progress Administration New Deal program in the United States. Originally part of the Federal Writers' Project, it was devoted to surveying and indexing historically significant records in state, county and local archives. The official mission statement was the "discovery, preservation, and listing of basic materials for research in the history of the United States."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Federal Art Project</span> New Deal relief program to fund the visual arts

The Federal Art Project (1935–1943) was a New Deal program to fund the visual arts in the United States. Under national director Holger Cahill, it was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the largest of the New Deal art projects. It was created not as a cultural activity, but as a relief measure to employ artists and artisans to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photography, theatre scenic design, and arts and crafts. The WPA Federal Art Project established more than 100 community art centers throughout the country, researched and documented American design, commissioned a significant body of public art without restriction to content or subject matter, and sustained some 10,000 artists and craft workers during the Great Depression.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carnegie Museum of Art</span> Art Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

The Carnegie Museum of Art, abbreviated CMOA, is an art museum in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The museum was founded in 1895 by the Pittsburgh-based industrialist Andrew Carnegie. It was the first museum in the United States with a primary focus on contemporary art. As instructed by its founder at the inception of the Carnegie International in 1896, the museum has been organizing many contemporary exhibitions that showcase the "Old Masters of tomorrow".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Folk Art Museum</span> Museum in New York, New York

The American Folk Art Museum is an art museum in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, at 2, Lincoln Square, Columbus Avenue at 66th Street. It is the premier institution devoted to the aesthetic appreciation of folk art and creative expressions of contemporary self-taught artists from the United States and abroad.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Sheeler</span> American painter

Charles Sheeler was an American artist known for his Precisionist paintings, commercial photography, and the avant-garde film, Manhatta, which he made in collaboration with Paul Strand. Sheeler is recognized as one of the early adopters of modernism in American art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Holger Cahill</span>

Edgar Holger Cahill was an Icelandic-American curator, writer, and arts administrator who served as the national director of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public Works of Art Project</span>

The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) was a program to employ artists, as part of the New Deal, during the Great Depression. The program was headed by Edward Bruce, under the United States Treasury Department with funding from the Civil Works Administration. The PWAP ran from 1933 to 1934 and was a New Deal program during the period of the Great Depression. The PWAP served as way to employ artists, while having competent representatives of the profession display their work in a public setting. Although the program lasted less than one year, it had employed 3,700 artists, who produced nearly 15,000 works of art. In an art exhibition that featured 451 paintings commissioned by the PWAP, 30 percent of the artists featured were in their twenties, and 25 percent were first-generation immigrants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spokane Art Center</span>

The Spokane Art Center in Spokane, Washington, was a community art school opened in 1938 as part of the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) Federal Art Project during the Great Depression. Its staff included many notable artists, and it was widely considered to be one of the nation's most successful FAP art centers. It closed in 1942.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blanton Museum of Art</span> Art museum in Austin, Texas

The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin is one of the largest university art museums in the U.S. with 189,340 square feet devoted to temporary exhibitions, permanent collection galleries, storage, administrative offices, classrooms, a print study room, an auditorium, shop, and cafe. The Blanton's permanent collection consists of more than 21,000 works, with significant holdings of modern and contemporary art, Latin American art, Old Master paintings, and prints and drawings from Europe, the United States, and Latin America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elsie Driggs</span> American painter

Elsie Driggs was an American painter known for her contributions to Precisionism, America's one indigenous modern-art movement before Abstract Expressionism, and for her later floral and figurative watercolors, pastels, and oils. She was the only female participant in the Precisionist movement, which in the 1920s and 1930s took a Cubist-inspired approach to painting the skyscrapers and factories that had come to define the new American landscape. Her works are in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Houston Museum of the Fine Arts, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the James A. Michener Art Museum in Pennsylvania, and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others. She was married to the American abstract artist Lee Gatch.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Constance Rourke</span> American writer

Constance Mayfield Rourke was an American author and educator. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Sorbonne and Vassar College. She taught at Vassar from 1910 to 1915. She died in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1941.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Reeves</span>

Ruth Marie Reeves (1892–1966) was an American painter, Art Deco textile designer and expert on Indian handicrafts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Addison Gallery of American Art</span> Academic museum in Andover, Massachusetts

The Addison Gallery of American Art is an academic museum dedicated to collecting American art, organized as a department of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roy King</span> American sculptor

Roy Elwood King was an American born sculptor, painter and civil engineer.

<i>Portrait of Leslie W. Miller</i>

Portrait of Leslie W. Miller is a 1901 painting by Thomas Eakins, Goodrich catalogue #348. It is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum (AARFAM) is the United States' first and the world's oldest continually operated museum dedicated to the preservation, collection, and exhibition of American folk art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edith Halpert</span> American art dealer

Edith Halpert or Edith Gregor Halpert was a pioneering New York City dealer of American modern art and American folk art. She brought recognition and market success to many avant-garde American artists. Her establishment, the Downtown Gallery, was the first commercial art space in Greenwich Village. When it was founded in 1926, it was the only New York gallery dedicated exclusively to contemporary American art by living artists. Over her forty-year career, Halpert showcased such modern art luminaries as Elie Nadelman, Max Weber, Marguerite and William Zorach, Stuart Davis, Peggy Bacon, Charles Sheeler, Marsden Hartley, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, William Steig, Jacob Lawrence, Walter Meigs, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and many others. Halpert later expanded her business to include American folk art, and certain nineteenth-century American painters, including Raphaelle Peale, William Michael Harnett, and John Frederick Peto, whom she considered to be precursors to American modernism.

Romana Javitz was an American artist, librarian, and Superintendent of the Picture Collection at the New York Public Library.

Lilias Marianne Ar de Soif Farley was a Canadian painter, sculptor, designer, and muralist in realism and abstraction. In 1967, she was awarded the Centennial Medal for Service to the Nation in the Arts. She was an alumna of the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts and was a member of the school's first graduating class.

References

  1. 1 2 "Index of American Design". www.nga.gov.
  2. 1 2 Kramer, Hilton (1972-12-03). "Designing America". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2022-01-31.
  3. "Index of American Design". National Gallery of Art. Retrieved 2022-01-31.
  4. "Art of the New Deal - FDR Presidential Library & Museum". www.fdrlibrary.org.
  5. Tuttle Clayton, Virginia (2002). Drawing on America's Past: Folk Art, Modernism, and the Index of American Design. UNC Press Books. pp. 20–34. ISBN   978-0-8078-2794-9.
  6. Allyn, Nancy E. (1982). "Defining American Design: A History of the Index of American Design, 1935-1942".
  7. Rubin, Joan Shelley (1990). "A Convergence of Vision: Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler, and American Art". American Quarterly. 42 (2): 191–222. doi:10.2307/2713015. ISSN   0003-0678. JSTOR   2713015.
  8. Kelly, Andrew (2015-07-31). Kentucky by Design: The Decorative Arts and American Culture. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 266–67. ISBN   978-0-8131-5569-2.
  9. Moore, William D. (2016-03-01). "Andrew Kelly, ed., Kentucky by Design: The Decorative Arts and American Culture". Winterthur Portfolio. 50 (1): 86–87. doi:10.1086/687165. ISSN   0084-0416.